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The Monster in the Mirror

Call me philistine, but as I was reading Jonathan Littell’s novel “The Kindly Ones,” a work of Tolstoyan heft, Dostoyevskyan darkness and Proustian sentence length (one of them goes on for three pages), I kept remembering those kiddie-historical fictions I used to read when I was 10 or 11. You must know the ones — those books written from the point of view of some plucky lad (it was always a lad) who just happened to be feeding George Washington’s horse at Valley Forge or polishing John Paul Jones’s boots aboard the Bonhomme Richard. Littell’s narrator, an SS functionary with the ironically bucolic name Maximilien Aue (if he were an Anglophone, his name would be Meadows), conveniently shows up when the Einsatzgruppen are shooting Jews at the lip of mass graves in Poland and Ukraine, and when World War II turns against Germany at the siege of Stalingrad. He pays inspection visits to Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald, and he’s summoned to the bunker in Berlin during Hitler’s last days. Naturally, he gets face time with such biggies as Eichmann, Himmler and, at unconscionably long last — on Page 959 of a 975-page narrative — the person you’ve been waiting for all along, the Führer himself. If I were to tell you what happens when they meet, you wouldn’t believe me, but imagine Col. Claus von Stauffenberg as one of the Three Stooges and you’ll have some idea. When you get this far into a novel, you should be able to tell whether something’s intentionally preposterous; but in this book, apparently a middlebrow historical epic gone willfully weird, it’s hard to trust that the author knows what he’s doing.

Littell, American-born but bilingual, wrote “The Kindly Ones” in French (as “Les Bienveillantes”), and it won both the Grand Prix du Roman from the Académie Française and the Prix Goncourt. (The translation, by Charlotte Mandell, seems clunky in spots: Littell’s narrator calls Schoenberg’s music “inaudible” rather than “unlistenable,” and surely there’s a less anachronistic alternative for the adjective “old-school.”) “The Kindly Ones” — the title refers to the Eumenides, the benevolent aspect of the Erinyes, or Furies — certainly presents itself as a serious work of art, and it doesn’t wear its heaviness lightly. Littell titles the novel’s seven sections as if it were a musical composition: Toccata, Allemandes I and II, Courante, Sarabande, Menuet (en Rondeaux), Air and Gigue. But this pretentiousness is appropriate to the pretensions of his narrator: like so many Nazis in novels and movies (and some real ones), Aue is an aficionado of classical music, though he’s more a Rameau kind of guy than a Wagnerite. He weighs in on the amateur violinist Eichmann’s interpretation of Brahms (“He didn’t make any mistakes, but he didn’t seem to under­stand that that wasn’t enough”) and on the pianism of Hans Frank, the Reich’s governor general for Poland, who “played pretty well, but used too much pedal.” Aue knows his literature too: he alludes not only to the “Oresteia” but to Herodotus, Chekhov, Flaubert, Stendhal, Lermontov, Melville, Chesterton — even to Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose Martian novels he recommends to Himmler as a model for postwar social reforms. Aue can also talk Kant, Hobbes and (you saw this coming) Nietzsche. Aue’s twin sister — more about her in a second — once studied with “a certain Dr. Carl Jung,” who, he notes, “has become quite well known since then.”

Aue’s aestheticism and erudition seem intended to raise that much-raised question: How can a sublimely civilized man also participate in hellish atrocities? And, by extension, how could the nation of Bach and Beethoven, Goethe and Schiller — but you’ve heard all this before. Such is presumably the basis on which the novel’s publisher bills it as “a morally challenging read.” But before we pull our chins out of shape, let’s recall that a certain Dr. Freud, who has also become quite well known, long ago posited that civilized man has a monster inside. Aue’s inner monster is a textbook doozy who busts out to commit a hands-on Oedipal murder — which Aue himself can’t remember after the fact. (Later on, he’ll commit more murders while fully conscious.) As if that weren’t enough, Littell also afflicts him with an improbably engineered case of narcissism. As a boy, Aue regularly has sex with that Jungian twin sister, gets caught and is forcibly separated from her. As an adult, he obsessively seeks to recreate their union — her name, significantly, is Una — by taking on both their identities: either by finding men to penetrate him anally or by doing the job on himself. You have to admire his single-minded ingenuity. On a walk in the woods, he finds a fallen tree and impales himself on the stub of a branch, which he custom-whittles for the purpose; on another occasion, he self-administers a sausage, which he scrupulously washes and then allows his mother and stepfather to eat.

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Illustration by Alex Nabaum

What does Littell hope to reveal with what Aue calls these “infantile obscenities”? I suppose we’re to connect this compulsion for self-completion with his indifference to the mass murders in which he’s complicit, but such peculiarity hardly seems necessary. Plenty of ordinary Germans, for whom a sausage was just a sausage, didn’t let the Holocaust ruin their appetites. Still, novelists love those kinky, stinky Nazis — like Norman Mailer’s excretorily fixated young Adi Hitler in “The Castle in the Forest” and A. N. Wilson’s full-grown flatulent Führer in “Winnie and Wolf” — with their telltale mania for purity, order and efficiency. Without anality and sexual dysfunction, the rationale seems to be, how could you make them credible? Ron Rosenbaum, whose 1998 book “Explaining Hitler” administered the definitive reproof to such shopworn psychosexual prurience, wrote in a recent article for Slate that the durable rumors of the Führer’s sexual oddities suggest “our need to prove that Hitler was not ‘normal,’ thus not like us,” and “a refusal to face the profundity and complexity of evil . . . by blaming it all on ludicrously unserious and ahistorical sexual mythologies, and the Freudian-influenced notion that all behavior has a sexual explanation at heart.” This is why “The Kindly Ones,” for all its aspirations to profundity, is less a moral challenge than a sheer test of endurance. Aue is simply too much of a freak, and his supposed childhood trauma too specialized and contrived, for us to take him seriously. When he tries to give us the moral willies by arguing that “you might also have done what I did,” visions of sausages dance in our heads.

But couldn’t someone raise a similar objection to Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert — another moral monster whose sexuality is formed by an improbable childhood episode? (I suspect Littell has studied both “Lolita” and “Ada,” Nabokov’s novel of brother-sister incest.) Humbert, after all, explains his adult proclivity for early pubescent girls as a result of being interrupted at the point of possessing a girl named Annabel Leigh when he was 13 and she a few months younger. But “Lolita” is hardly meant to be a naturalistic novel, and Nabokov, anti-Freudian to his very soul, didn’t expect us to take this “trauma” as credible psychoanalytic motivation — in which he didn’t believe. (The girl’s obtrusively Poe-derived name is just one tip-off to the novel’s thoroughgoing artifice.) While “The Kindly Ones” may have a Nabokovian narrator — obscurantist in his erudition, hyperspecialized in his sexual tastes — its exhaustively researched historicity and documentarian realism clearly derive from “War and Peace.” It would take a writer of unimaginable genius to work these opposed tendencies into a coherent whole — and Tolstoy himself might have thought twice before trying to write fiction about the Holocaust. (Though, being Tolstoy, he would eventually have rolled up his sleeves anyhow.) Since nothing can rival the monstrosity of the historical record and the eyewitness accounts, the novelist may choose to put the focus on the individual, whose private concerns, however dire, will seem dinky in the context of what happened to six million individuals (not counting the always insufficiently anguished perpetrators). Or the novelist can try a knight’s move into the absurd — as Littell has done in episodes like the narrator’s odd encounter with Hitler — but it’s ultimately just an artful dodge. Absurdity may be disorienting, but brutality is absolute.

You can’t blame Littell for failing an impossible self-assignment. Nor can you fault a young novelist with a world of information, erudition and ambition for taking it on. (How ya gonna keep ’em down on Revolutionary Road after they’ve seen Auschwitz?) But to doll up a novel about Nazism and the Holocaust with pop-fiction conventions on the one hand — his narrator’s Forrest Gump-likeubiquity, for instance — and quirky postmodern touches on the other is to dance on the edge of impertinence. Littell indulges in a series of surrealistic dream sequences and extra-fancy sex scenes (in one, the face of Aue’s mother appears in a mirror as he’s being penetrated), and his narrator (again, like Humbert Humbert) likes to remind us that he’s still sitting there memoirizing away. “But perhaps you don’t really care about any of this. Maybe, instead of my unwholesome, abstruse reflections, you would rather have anecdotes, spicy little stories. . . . I’m quite willing to tell you a few stories: but then let me just dig at random among my memories and my notes; I’ve told you, I’m getting tired, I have to start bringing this to an end.” (Don’t get excited — he’s still got nearly 200 pages to go.)

Given all that’s happening outside this narrator’s head, who cares? In some other novel, Aue might be a magnificently dark, Beckettian spirit. “My pineal eye, gaping vagina in the middle of my forehead, projected a crude, gloomy, implacable light on this world, and allowed me to read each drop of sweat, each pimple, each poorly shaven hair on the garish faces that assailed me as an emotion, the infinite cry of anguish of the child forever prisoner in the atrocious body of a clumsy adult incapable, even by killing, of avenging himself for the fact of living.” But in this book, his exquisitely mistuned consciousness seems a form of dandyism — a moral and spiritual luxury item in a world of devastation.

THE KINDLY ONES

By Jonathan Littell. Translated by Charlotte Mandell

983 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $29.99

David Gates’s most recent book is “The Wonders of the Invisible World,” a collection of stories.

A version of this review appears in print on , on Page BR10 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The Monster in the Mirror. Today's Paper|Subscribe